Interview with Denise Low on House of Grace, House of Blood — August 20, 2025
In her documentary poetry collection House of Grace, House of Blood (University of Arizona Press, 2024), Denise Low engages with the Gnadenhutten Massacre of 1782, in which ninety-six pacifist Christian Lenapes were murdered in Ohio by a renegade militia of white soldiers. A likely descendant of both the killed and the killers, Low raises questions of erasure, complicity, and meaning-making—questions that gain new urgency in light of the so-called Executive Order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” issued in March 2025. At a time when the Trump administration is attempting to silence nuanced, critical approaches to American history in favor of a spurious narrative of “greatness,” Low’s courageously honest work serves as encouragement for poets to continue doing the brave work of truth-telling—and for us all to do the brave work of reading and listening.
Julie Swarstad Johnson:A crucial aspect of this book is your heritage among both the Lenape people who were killed and the white militia members who murdered them. How long have you known about your connection to both sides of the Gnadenhutten massacre?
Denise Low: This book is a fascinating story of little-known histories of 18th century Indigenous experiences. School history books skip over the 1500s, the time when Lenape and other Algonquin-language peoples successfully resisted Swedes, Dutch, Spanish, and English. They minimize Indigenous histories of the 1600s and 1700s. Research for my memoir The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) led me to diverse archives of those centuries—stories from Lenape elders, local histories, family stories, military and church archives, and more.
I researched the memoir maybe ten years. Along the way, I found an obituary that identified my three-times-great grandfather as an “Indian fighter” killed by a Lenape named Corn just miles from Gnadenhutten and a few years later. Military rolls showed him or a close relative in the rogue group that perpetrated the Gnadenhutten massacre (outside of official Continental Army actions).
I also read histories of the Lenapes, including events of genocide like the New Jersey Pavonia massacre and the subsequent Kieft’s War. Gnadenhutten was not an isolated incident. As I found information and a few documents for Lenape people—they lost written tribal records during the 18th century—I also found my Lenape-heritage great-grandmother’s origins just upriver from Gnadenhutten. Certain written documentation is unlikely, but a census record is marked “I” for “Indian” for the family, and the land records and local histories all fit. This book is a patchwork of Indigenous and colonial oral, public, and private sources.
Johnson:You navigate this complex reality beautifully in the book. In “A Mixed-Blood’s Questions,” you write, “Which hand do I choose? So quick am I / to say the clean one.” And at the end of the poem you ask, “What blood / passes to me only in acts of love?”
These questions seem to contrast with an assertion by a figure in the poem “Colonial Belief,” who “as a Black woman and Lesbian / […] is rewriting the bible, / to purge it of slavery and genocide.” Your response is to offer her “my Canaanite grandfather’s hand / and also the other grandfather’s / the one that killed Canaanites.” This is such a poignant moment. I read it as suggesting that to write heinous crimes out of a shared text, out of one type of history—even when done from a right desire to rid the present and future of this terrible violence—is itself a kind of erasure. Offering both hands in response is to witness to truth (and this poem falls in the section of the book titled “Witness”). Is that an accurate reading?
Low:I meant my response to the woman as admiration, that this marginalized poet was stepping into a role of authority and empowerment—and I hope that my joining of hands indicates my support for her and my emulation. She has a certain identity, yet with my mixed background, I do not—putting me in a tentative position with her and with others. Yet, as you suggest, that conflicted position suspends opposites, which is its own gift—even with no resolution possible. And the irony of wars is the exchanges that occur: of blood (even through rape), of technologies, of shared histories. Truth, yes, is complicated by many axis lines of change, beyond mono-vocal, even good-and-evil bi-vocal viewpoints. So yes, I witness to the complexity of bloodlines and of “texts” of all types.
Johnson:As someone who writes poetry, literary prose, and scholarly criticism, what led you to write about the Gnadenhutten massacre in poetry? What advantages and disadvantages did poetry offer for this historically important and also very personal subject?
Low: I cannot exactly document that the relationship between my family and the Gnadenhutten massacre exists, but in poetry, I can suggest the contradictions like this that many mixed-blood people experience. I can suggest that my ancestors could have been present in that battleground even if I cannot “prove” they were at that exact event. The archival language interested me, and focusing on language is the basis of poetry, not prose. I once visited Thailand and planned to write a travel memoir. As I tried to fit my experience into sentences and paragraphs, the energy dissipated. Instead, I ended up with poetry, Thailand Journal (Woodley Memorial Press).
With this project, the constraints of prose in the memoir The Turtle’s Beating Heart led me to explore materials that were edited out, more historic than memoir. I wanted to sustain the energy of this one signature event lost to history. In House of Grace, House of Blood, I am able to interrogate transcriptions of interviews, thread visual images throughout (a postcard and its text, for example, a Moravian grammar book for Lenapes), weave a word-basket of alternating archival words and my own—many liberating forms that are possible in the unbound possibilities of this century’s United States English.
Johnson:As you mention, House of Grace, House of Blood makes extensive use of archival documents. As an archivist myself, I’m always interested in people’s experience with archival materials. Can you describe your experience with archives as you worked on this book? Were you able to see physical items in person or did you access them digitally? Did this have any impact on your writing?
Low: The most important archive was the intangible one of oral tradition—family and tribal. A number of enrolled Delaware elders were generous in sharing unwritten information, which was essential to me personally. And I did not proceed until I heard my uncle affirm our family origins; my brother was also an important source for the memoir. The lacuna in family stories is informative also—what was not said/documented/remembered. Talks with elders was the most impactful of the sources, and the least material.
I appreciate Kevin Young’s discussion of “shadow books” in The Grey Album: Music, Shadows, Lies (2012). These are “books” that were never written because of impediments to black authorship, “removed” books or books with gaps/censored redactions, and lost books—“the oral book of black culture is at times not passed down, at others simply passed over,” Young writes. I appreciate the specific ways these shadow books exist in black United States culture and also, in analogous ways, in Indigenous cultures. Glyphic language of Lenapes is denied legitimacy yet glyph carvings on trees were accurate signposts; rock art is plentiful, and narrative glyphs in basketry, on clan poles, and wampum are all part of a literary cultural legacy.
Another aspect of researching the Gnadenhutten massacre was finding so many contemporaneous sources familiar from other contexts—Benjamin Franklin, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, and novelist William Dean Howells, to name a few. The English language of that era has a stately, formal cast that mutes the descriptions with an odd sense of distance, despite the actual obscene violence. Intertextual poems in the collection share some of this disparity as they juxtapose rhetorical styles of horrifying details. That language, altered only for clarity (as noted in the book), creates a layer for readers to acknowledge and retranslate.
Poems that use contemporary formats address the same distancing from a contemporary viewpoint—“Weapon of Choice” uses dictionary format and “Genocide Mathematics” is a mock Excel format. There are found poems based on road signs and museum signage. These various language styles come together to create a poly-vocal, multi-temporal presence of the people and events. The conversations with key people were the most significant.
Johnson:House of Grace, House of Blood so clearly illustrates the importance of tradition and oral memory, just as you said here. I know the word “archive” holds so much more than institutional holdings of documents, but I still automatically think of documents! Your answer and this book are an important corrective to that idea of what constitutes an archive.
In addition to people and community, your poems also show the importance of “a living archive, not folded pages,” specifically a tree trained to show the way, shaped by hands that learned the craft from tribal elders (“Trail Marker Tree (My Husband’s Family History)”). The land itself is a scared text in these poems: “Lectio divina, I read the sky’s text thrice,” you write in “Geography Lesson (Of Rivers and Mountains and Stars).” In “Grape” you write, “There is a sacred alphabet: / each plant a syllable sound.” Is there anything more you would like to highlight about these types of sacred texts for readers of the book?
Low: Alphabetic written forms are not the only measure of literacy, in my opinion. Asian characters are accepted by western historians as legitimate documentation, but oral history is iffy, rock markings are dismissed, and Mayan syllabary glyphs are outside the canon. I have argued that Plains Indigenous “ledger art” is a form of literacy in an article “Composite Indigenous Genres: Cheyenne Ledger Art as Literature” (Studies in American Indian Literature, 2006) and in a book, Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors, co-authored with Ramon Powers (University of Nebraska Press, 2021).
To shift perspective from a Eurocentric rhetorical position in House of Grace, House of Blood, I’ve used Internet sites, highway signs, museum placards, photographs, Smithsonian field interviews, sign trees, dance regalia, and other media to create an inclusive suite of documents. Further, the sky and land both present sign systems for communication. Tree root webs interact with chemical signals, for one example, and stratigraphy is a passive record of rock history. My husband Tom Weso, Menominee, told how his mother sent him out to play in the woods by himself, with the understanding that the trees, the animals, the plants, the waterways—all would be living beings who would accompany him and teach him.
Johnson:Part of what initially drew my attention to House of Grace, House of Blood is that the murdered Lenape were pacifist Moravian Christians—I’ve researched and written about pacifist German Baptist Brethren who lived through the Battle of Gettysburg. In your book, the fact that the murdered Lenapes were pacifists underscores the absolute brutality and hypocrisy of the white, Christian militia members who murdered them. Christian faith itself seems largely hollow, empty words that can’t “un-spell / the spell of Gnadenhutten” (“Spelling Book for the Town of Gnadenhutten, 1782”). How did an understanding of pacificism—Christian and otherwise—shape this work?
Low:Yes, the pacifism aspect of the Moravian-converted Lenapes is another layer that adds to the hypocrisy. The drunk militia members allowed the victims to spend the night in Christian prayer and hymn-singing—such a hollow gesture. One of the perpetrators was an elder in the Cross Creek Church in Pennsylvania, yet he murdered helpless people. The dehumanization of Indigenous people, with the cross-reference to Canaanites in the bible, is especially irrational. Not all Lenapes were Moravian pacifists, though, and in the aftermath of this event, conflict with Lenapes continued, including the killing of my relative. William Crawford and Charles Bilderback are two United States soldiers who were killed by Lenapes in retaliation.
I am not a pacifist, but I am a life-long member of the Congregational church—which has been a haven, ironically. My life is full of paradoxes, and this is one. This denomination allows individual interpretation of the bible, self-governance of congregations, and no priesthood. I grapple with the devastation that Christian denominations wreaked on others, yet my own experience of this church has been as a support, especially when I was a child. No answers, but the poem “Baptism of Moravian Indian Converts, Pennsylvania, 1757” attempts to address the contradictions.
Johnson:An acceptance of those paradoxes comes through in your writing, paired with your commitment to correcting the record when the truth is obscured or watered-down. A willingness to accept paradoxes while pursuing truth feels particularly important at the moment in American history. The Trump administration wants us to believe that American history contains nothing but greatness—truth in all its complexity is seen as dangerous.
By contrast, in your preface you write, “I acknowledge all the conflicted history of my homeland and my family, with the intention that clarity can lead to healing.” Have you experienced any moments of healing, personal or communal, small or large, as you have shared this book after its publication?
Low: I have healed some, as being heard is a big issue for me and for Native peoples in general as the erased histories are being recuperated to some degree. I understand my family’s dynamics better. And I do know what further questions arise for me, and what I want to explore next. Humans are complicated, and no one is completely great nor failed. Seeing clearly all the kindnesses and cruelties is the closest I can come to healing.
Johnson:You offer a beautiful definition of healing in that final sentence—healing in the sense of restoring to wholeness, or as much wholeness as we can achieve as humans. Through this book, you model how that healing of history can be done with both rigor and incredible grace. Thank you so much for undertaking this work.
Can you tell us more about what you’re exploring next?
Low:I so appreciate your in-depth comments and kind words. This project asks readers to open their minds and their hearts, and you have done both.
For future projects, I’m working in several directions. First, I am researching enslavement of Lenape and related groups in Bermuda and in the North American colonies. In a recent article, a scholar notes, “The first documented arrival of a Black person in the islands occurred in 1616 when the Edwin docked in the harbor of the Town of St. George, bearing goods from the Caribbean, which included for the colonists ‘one Indian and a Negroe (the first thes Ilands euer had)’” (quoting J. Henry Lefroy, 1884). The scholar goes on to follow the destiny of African American slavery, while mostly ignoring the evidence of Native enslavement history. I want to correct that omission. I also find myself with a pile of poems about jazz, a lifelong passion, and that may evolve into a longer treatment.
—
Denise Low is a former Kansas Poet Laureate and a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. Her recent books include Shadow Light: Poems, The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival, and A Casino Bestiary. Her Northern Cheyenne Ledger Art by Fort Robinson Breakout Survivors won a Kansas Notable Book Award. She founded the creative writing program at Haskell Indian Nations University and is past board president of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs. She currently is a literary co-director for The 222 in Sonoma County, California, and on the advisory board of Write On Door County. She has Northern European and Lenape/Munsee (Delaware) heritage.
